Top 60 Caroline Knapp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.”

— Caroline Knapp

2. “Before you get a dog, you can’t quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can’t imagine living any other way.”

— Caroline Knapp

3. “Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.”

— Caroline Knapp

4. “Alcoholism is the disease of more.”

— Caroline Knapp

5. “The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.”

— Caroline Knapp

6. “Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That’s quite the loaded word, ’we.”

— Caroline Knapp

7. “Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.”

— Caroline Knapp

8. “Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.”

— Caroline Knapp

9. “When you love somebody, or something, its amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.”

— Caroline Knapp

10. “By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.”

— Caroline Knapp

11. “All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn’t even know we needed or wanted to go.”

— Caroline Knapp

12. “I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.”

— Caroline Knapp

13. “When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”

— Caroline Knapp

14. “Dogs have such short life spans, it’s like a concentrated version of a human life. When they get older, they become much more like our mothers. They wait for us, watch out for us, are completely fascinated by everything we do.”

— Caroline Knapp

15. “Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”

— Caroline Knapp

16. “Academic achievement was something I’d always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.”

— Caroline Knapp

17. “I am shy by nature, a person who’s always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree.”

— Caroline Knapp

18. “Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who’d be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?”

— Caroline Knapp

19. “The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

— Caroline Knapp

20. “Why do I find the fantasy – husband, family, kids – exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?”

— Caroline Knapp

21. “To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”

— Caroline Knapp

22. “Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.”

— Caroline Knapp

23. “I’m still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I’d like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.”

— Caroline Knapp

24. “Dogs are fantasies that don’t disappoint.”

— Caroline Knapp

25. “I once heard a woman who’d lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I’d amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.”

— Caroline Knapp

26. “When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no.”

— Caroline Knapp

27. “I’m 38 and I’m single, and I’m having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.”

— Caroline Knapp

28. “A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can’t quite handle attachments to humans.”

— Caroline Knapp

29. “Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.”

— Caroline Knapp

30. “Mastery over the body – its impulses, its needs, its size – is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.”

— Caroline Knapp

31. “Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.”

— Caroline Knapp

32. “Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind.”

— Caroline Knapp

33. “I’ve always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.”

— Caroline Knapp

34. “It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.”

— Caroline Knapp

35. “The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable – What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?”

— Caroline Knapp

36. “Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous.”

— Caroline Knapp

37. “Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.”

— Caroline Knapp

38. “You’re the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.”

— Caroline Knapp

39. “What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she’s wearing or the food she’s not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn’t think about body image, ever?”

— Caroline Knapp

40. “You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.”

— Caroline Knapp

41. “Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.”

— Caroline Knapp

42. “My recipe for bliss on a Friday night consists of a ‘New York Times’ crossword puzzle and a new episode of ‘Homicide;’ Saturdays and Sundays are oriented around walks in the woods with the dog, human companion in tow some of the time but not always.”

— Caroline Knapp

43. “Cottage cheese is one of our culture’s most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution.”

— Caroline Knapp

44. “I don’t think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don’t think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.”

— Caroline Knapp

45. “The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.”

— Caroline Knapp

46. “These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake – add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem – and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow... The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it’s something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled.”

— Caroline Knapp

47. “Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt.”

— Caroline Knapp

48. “For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.”

— Caroline Knapp

49. “What makes you feel empty and what makes you feel full? Who, or what, makes you feel connected or soothed or joyful? How much companionship do you need, and how much solitude? What feels right, what feels like enough? We all have to feel our way through those questions in life, and although she cannot provide the answers for me, I have the sense that Lucille is gently leading me toward them. I pick up that leash; I go forward.”

— Caroline Knapp

50. “Anyone who’s ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back. You need it; it’s a central part of who you are.”

— Caroline Knapp